The Cafe Paradiso Web Site

Lunch service resumes in Paradiso this coming Friday, the 2nd March, after a break of four weeks. And, rest assured, we haven’t been idling during the long afternoons of February. Here’s the new menu.

Besides training a couple of new chefs, we’ve been trying out some new dishes, buying a few new bits of crockery and generally toying with different approaches to the idea of lunch. And all the while coping with a very busy dinner service, thank you very much. Seriously, thank you, let us pause for a second to thank all who came out to dine, making this February a much more enjoyable experience than the past couple of grim Februarys. (Can you pluralise months? Spellcheck says no).

So what is the result our think-in? It is this: dinner is dinner and lunch is lunch. Yes, you might well ask if it took us a month of noodling around to come up with that? Kind of, but not really. It was more the case that we started with that sentence and tried to figure out what the practical consequences of it were for us.

Because we want everyone who comes to Paradiso to have the best experience possible of what we do, there is a tendency to leak dinner-style dishes onto the lunch menu. We worry that people coming for lunch, particularly from out of town, won’t “get” us if we only give them lunch. This is not how we want to think, it just happens gradually until one day we sit down to eat lunch and realise “hey, this is dinner!”

So we’ve taken the lunch menu apart, stripped out the dinner, and put it back together in a format that is less formal and, we believe, more fun to graze around. Starters have been dismantled into smaller, simpler dishes that can be treated as sharing plates, side dishes, tapas or proper starters; and we’ve added a couple of large flavour-bursting salads to the bigger plates. Hopefully, the options are there in this new format to provide anything from a casual light lunch of multiple flavours to a blowout three courses with knobs on.

While giving you a different way to eat Paradiso, the new format will give us a new way to put ingredients together and to respond to produce availability.

We’re looking forward to playing around with flavours and styles in the coming months, especially as Spring kicks in and produce starts to flow from the farm. Some old favourites will be making jazzed-up guest appearances rather than hanging around getting stale, and hopefully some new dishes will soon be old favourites.

Check out the first menu. Then come in and take a graze through it. Lunch is served Friday and Saturday, from 12 noon to 3pm, and you can book on 021 4277939.